In the “Double Take,” Helena and Theodore have Trump whiplash on the threat of mass deportations in the food system. In “Forks and Knives,” the discussion turns to the historic cuts to food assistance for low-income Americans that are playing out as the “One, Big Beautiful Bill” makes its way through Congress. And for “Good Vibes,” the federal Dietary Guidelines may drop recommendations for how much Americans should drink. Glass clinking sound or MAHA mistake?
TRANSCRIPT
Theodore Ross: This is Forked: Food Politics in the MAHA Age, with your cohosts, Helena Bottemiller Evich , and me, Theodore Ross. In this episode, we’re talking mass deportation whiplash in the food system, historic cuts to food assistance for low-income Americans, and finally, is it time to drink more alcohol? Helena, hello. How are you?
Helena Bottemiller Evich: I’m doing well. How are you?
Theodore: I’m good. I’m glad for us to be back after our little break, and now we are all new, rereleased. This is the premier episode of Forked. So let’s get to it. As you know, every episode of Forked, we begin with something called the double take, which is something that’s happening in food policy and in the food system that is so shocking and usually not so good that you have to do a double take. It makes you just get surprised. So what do you think it is? What should we talk about?
Helena: Well, I think recently the entire ag world, particularly the folks who are producing specialty crops and also meat processing and dairy. Those sectors have been freaking out over trying to figure out what the Trump administration is doing on immigration and whether or not ICE raids are targeting or are not targeting their operations.
I think historically agriculture has been somewhat spared from a lot of immigration enforcement. I think there’s been sort of an understanding that a very large percentage or large portion of the workforce that keeps the entire food system running lacks legal status. And that’s been something that I think officials have understood for a long time.
And so it hasn’t been one of the industries that is targeted as much. Recently though, we saw some raids at an Omaha, Nebraska, meat plant, and we also saw some raids in California that were targeting some, I think they were specialty crop operations. And that really sent shockwaves across the industry.
We then saw President Trump — clearly agriculture freaked out at the administration — and we saw President Trump go on social media and say: Changes are coming. And it wasn’t just agriculture, he was saying changes are coming for. He was saying, you know, hospitality, clearly the folks in the hospitality world were also freaking out to the White House, and he wrote on social,.
I think it was on Truth Social: Our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good longtime workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.
And this made a lot of people do a double take. Both I think opponents and supporters of President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies because they were, like, what?
You know, this flies in the face of this whole mass deportation pledge. It seemed like they were changing gears, and then within three to four days, they were, the administration was, like, actually no, we are going to still do immigration, right? So we had anofficial change in policy that lasted so short that I don’t even know that you can call it a change in policy.
Theodore: I don’t think you can. I don’t think you can.
Helena: Yeah, we’re back. But now they’re saying, oh, well, we’re still going to do worksite raids, but we’re gonna focus on criminal, you know, criminal activity. And that’s also very confusing because that’s not what they were doing, right? That almost always they are seeking folks who lack legal status.
They’re not seeking people with other criminal records.
Theodore: So let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about this. This is a very classic Trumpian sequence of events, right, or sequence of nonevents really, depending on how you look at it. And I think first, let’s go, let’s walk back through some of the things you said when we talk about the food system and workers.
There’s, you know, statistics on this vary all over the place, but the generally accepted stat that is, among farmworkers, about 40 percent of those workers in the United States are undocumented.
Helena: And I think it varies by sector. Yes.
Theodore: Right. And then in California, that number — you see numbers all over the map — but somewhere around 50 is, and then maybe as high as 75 percent.
So then when we’re talking about the food system in the United States, to a certain degree, we are talking about undocumented workers, right?
Helena: Yes.
Theodore: It’s less meatpacking. So when you pledge to deport them, you are talking about deporting your food system, right?. Now, yeah, go ahead.
Helena: Well, yeah. I mean, there’s a saying in agriculture — this is particularly, I think, a specialty crop saying in that world. Growers say, we’re either going to import labor or we’re going to import all of our produce.
That’s just the trade. And we do, by the way, import a ton of produce, in part because of the labor costs, but also just like the general economics of it. So, yeah. And it’s at every level, right? It’s not just production, it’s not just harvesting,
Theodore: It’s across the board.
Helena: It’s the planting, it’s the weeding, it’s the food delivery, it’s the dishwashers, it’s the restaurants, it’s the, I mean, the whole way through.
Theodore: So that’s the baseline. That’s the baseline. And you have Trump on social media. So to call it an official change of policy is a little bit misleading, I think.
Helena: Well, they did, I think they did actually issue a memo, like ICE. You know, I don’t cover ICE specifically, but they did. They like put it in writing for a hot second …
Theodore: After the Trump Social, after the Truth Social mention. He says this on Truth Social. His administration takes action. They put out a guidance saying they’re pausing these processes for farmworkers, hotel workers, and restaurant workers.
Helena: Restaurant workers got added, I think, right?
Theodore: This lasts for almost no time. Nobody really knows what it means. And then when it’s taken back, you have almost, and sort of a way of looking that it can never really happen. I mean, there’s this quote that I like from Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security, and her response when she’s asked about this pause and unpause is that, quote, there will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts. Fine, right?
But what that means is that what you’ve injected into the system is not mass. deportation. Not, not mass deportation. It’s just chaos. And that is the true Trumpian pattern. And then one last point on this, and I’d like to hear from you on it. This is from the Migration Policy Institute.
It gives a whole sort of broader context for what we’re talking about, or not talking about, because something, it is not happening, right? And it’s, quote, a recent report: Even as the number of immigration arrests is up significantly in the United States, the current pace of deportation suggests the administration will fall well short of its stated goal of 1 million deportations annually, and they are in fact deporting at a rate that is slower than Joe Biden.
So what are we talking about here?
Helena: Well, I think there’s a couple things going on. One is that, like you talked about, classic Trumpian pattern. This has long been documented, that the last person who talks to Trump about an issue holds a lot of sway, like whatever, you know, viewpoint is fresh in the president’s mind, holds just a tremendous amount of sway in terms of something like this. Like changing a policy or changing a mind, even if it didn’t last. And we saw some reporting out of the New York Times that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had been basically warning to the president directly that, you know, agriculture industry leaders were saying, we’re afraid our workers are not going to show up, broadly, like across the food system.
And what then would the ripple effects of that be? And I mean, I think it’s important to remember too that we are talking about real people, like there is a human element to this. These are real families. This is real fear. That is all very, very real. And then you get to the bare-bones economics of it, and it’s like, literally, the food system can’t function.
These businesses can’t function. Dairies can’t function. Dairy is one of the most reliant on workers who lack legal status because they need year-round labor. And a lot of the, even the guestworker programs, where you can bring in temporary agricultural workers, those are for seasons, seasonality.
Theodore: H-2A workers.
Helena: Yeah, H-2A workers. So the H-2A program has really never worked for the dairy industry, and that’s a big challenge. And so, you know, the economics of having workers across the country, across many different commodities, being afraid to go to work because they’re afraid that they’re going to get ripped apart from their families or they’re going to have to leave their community.
Or maybe, I mean, I think fearing the worst, that they’re going to get sent to an El Salvadorean prison or not have any due process. I mean, there’s just a lot of fear, and you can understand why. And so there’s the human element and then, married with that, is the very real economic and sort of food system impact.
And I think the industry is trying to make the case to the administration that it’s not just that this is disruptive, but you could potentially be seeing food costs go up, like this is a ripple effect that would affect consumers directly down the line. And so, you know, we don’t have great reporting or numbers on how widespread the impact is, but the anecdotal reports are that, yeah, a lot of farmworkers are not showing up. They’re afraid to go to work.
Theodore: We’ve seen this in some of our reporting at FERN. We have reporters working on a story about farmworkers in Florida. And again, it’s a very similar pattern. We sent a reporter down to Florida to look at what was happening in a particular sector agriculturally, and at that point, nothing happened yet.
But it did later, and people were scared throughout. And the industry, which generally, instinctively, I’m not super sympathetic to them. Of course, they could pay their workers more and maybe change some of the calculations here, but I understand. I want to eat, too, and I want to eat cheap blueberries. I want to eat cheap strawberries.
But in each of these cases, we’re dealing with the same sort of thing, where the closest we’re coming to a coherent policy is fear. And that’s not really a policy, that’s not a coherent policy, but that’s the closest we get. Meanwhile, the opportunities for reform, whether it’s for H-2A workers, guestworkers, any number of programs that you could to change that statistic about 40 percent of the workers not being here without legal status in some meaningful way.
There’s no progress, there’s no way to make progress while you’re doing these kinds of things. I mean, I don’t know that I have an answer of how do we make a more fair food system for our workers, but I know that this is not how you do it.
Helena: Yeah, and I mean, I think, on all sides of this issue politically, the people who work on this the most, like the folks on the right and the left who work specifically on the ag labor issue, would a hundred percent agree that the current system is not working, has not worked for a long time.
I mean, it is probably the number one, if not one of the top bottlenecks for increasing production of all sorts of — whether it’s fruits and vegetables or just other business, businesses can’t expand or they have to shrink because they don’t have the workforce. It’s an incredible constraint on these businesses.
And so I think there is broad recognition. But yeah, politically, this is just, it’s not going to happen. It’s too hot of a topic, and even within the, you know, the brief pause orflip-flop that we had. It was very, very brief, but the right, on X and I’m sure on other platforms, was freaking out. They were so mad about this, that it was like a betrayal …
Theodore: About the pause.
Helena: Yeah, about the pause — that it was not what they voted for, that, like, no exception, sort of this hard hard-line view. And there was also reporting in the New York Times that some of the hard-line immigration folks within the Trump administration were also very angry and felt blindsided by it.
So there is a really significant faction within the MAGA base that is just hard line. I mean, they don’t, they don’t care. They literally don’t care. You’ll see stuff where it’s, like, well, those businesses should go under. I mean, there’s folks who literally believe that just let it fail. You know, I mean, that is an extreme view. But that is a very real thread running through the base.
Theodore: And that’s the sort of Stephen Miller point of view, right? You know, the ideologically very driven types. And I don’t know what Miller specifically did or didn’t do about this, but if I’m Brooke Rollins and I’m running USDA, which is not gonna happen, where does that leave …
Helena: You don’t want to run USDA? That’s a really hard job.
Theodore: I don’t want to be Brooke Rollins either.
Helena: It’s a big, that’s like a sprawling, that’s a sprawling permit.
Theodore: Yes. Many people could or should run USDA, Theodore Ross is not one of them. Just saying that.
Helena: Breaking news here.
Theodore: So, I mean, if you’re that split within the Republican coalition, such as it exists for somebody who’s not exactly a pragmatist in Brooke Rollins, but somewhat, they end up getting …
Helena: I think she’s a realist in that she, you know, her job is to promote the interests of U.S. agriculture, and they’re not joking about this, right? They’re very serious about the impacts and, you know, I don’t know what’s going to happen. It was dizzying to even watch it unfold.
I have some good friends who cover DHS directly, and I mean even just talking to them, the whirlwinds that they were in to sort of pin that down. And then by the time it was sort of pinned down, it had changed. I mean, it was really no good. Really a crazy thing. I do think, I mean, the end result is chaos.
I think the message that people get who work on farms, who work in these places, who maybe in some cases did have legal status or do have a work permit but are still very nervous about just getting deported. There’s just so much fear. I think that’s the bottom line.
Theodore: The term that came up a lot just in spending some time looking into this was whiplash, right? And the thing about whiplash — I was in a car wreck once when I was a kid, and my parents had whiplash. They had to wear those neck braces. You know, the thing about whiplash is it hurts, right?
So let’s move on. Before we get to Forks and Knives and our next topic, I just want to explain a little bit about to our audience about where we are with Forked.
So Forked, this is our premier episode. We’re calling it our premier episode. It’s actually our fourth episode, right? We did the first three on REAP/SOW, which is the platform for All FERN audio, which you can find. But we now are launching that as its own separate podcast with its own landing page.
You can find it anywhere you get your podcasts or on the FERN website. It’s also available on our YouTube page at FERN, under FERN News. The FERN News YouTube page, and you can find it there with all of our audio and all the other stuff we do. And I don’t know if you guys know this, although you probably do if you’re going to listen to this podcast, but the Food Fix podcast is the single best food policy newsletter out there and maybe …
Helena: The Food Fix newsletter. You’re so in podcast mode.
Theodore: I know. I’m sorry. Food Fix newsletter. I apologize. Yeah. Maybe Helena can tell you all about how you can find it.
Helena: Yeah. So anyone who wants to follow what’s going on in Washington. Every week, I write a newsletter called Food Fix. You can go find it at foodfix.co. Get yourself on the email list.
And we love having consumers and, I mean, literally everyone. We have folks that are in the industry that work on Capitol Hill that are, you know, steeped in the details of policymaking. We also have a lot of parents and nurses and teachers and consumers, and it’s great. Yeah.
Theodore: Don’t just get on the newsletter. Pay, pay for it.
Helena: Well, if you want, yeah. If you work in the space, it’s worth upgrading to get it twice a week for sure.
Theodore: All right. All right. Enough PR. Let’s talk about Forks and Knives. The status quo, the thing that is happening. What is that, Helena?
Helena: Yeah, I think the big, the meatiest thing moving, the actual policy that is probably going to change and that is moving through Washington right now is this — the listeners may have heard about the big, beautiful bill, Trump’s big, beautiful bill. That’s what he calls it. And that is really a name for the reconciliation package that Republicans are pushing through the House and the Senate.
Without being too wonky, it’s essential. Using budget reconciliation is essentially a way to get around the Senate’s filibuster. So you don’t need 60 votes to put something over the line. You can get it across the line with 51 votes, and that gets, that makes you …
Theodore: You don’t need Democrats, you need no Democrat.
Helena: You don’t need Democrats. And, you know, Democrats have used this process as well. In fact, isn’t that how we got the Affordable Care Act? I feel like maybe we did. I mean, that was a while ago, and I didn’t cover healthcare policy, but it is used sometimes to get big things done without the other party.
Because you get around that — 60 votes is usually you’re going to need some pretty strong bipartisan, and that’s one of the reasons why the farm bill always has to be bipartisan, just because to get it through the Senate, that’s just the way that it’s been. So reconciliation is a different process. It’s allowing a much more partisan bill to move forward, and look, I mean, the Republicans right now are on track.
I think they’re trying to get at least the reconciliation package through the Senate by July 4. You know, these deadlines that Washington gives itself are sort of squishy, but this summer we’re likely to see this get passed. And the reason why this is a big deal in food and ag is that we’re basically passing a major chunk of the farm bill in a way — like, they are cutting Snap spending. .So supplemental nutrition.
Theodore: Yeah, let’s talk about that. This is the big issue here, the House bill, and now what looks to be the bill in the Senate, there’s upwards of $200 billion in cuts to SNAP if I have, if I understand.
Helena: So yeah, it’s $200 billion. So the Senate bill is $200 billion over a decade. So it’s about $20 billion a year that’s getting cut out of SNAP spending, right? So basically they’re taking some of the pie away from nutrition, from SNAP, which is a program that helps 42 million people. The average benefit is $187 a month, which comes out to about $6 a day. So we are not talking about a super-generous, you know, benefit when you think about the cost of food and all of that. And it helps a lot of people — so 42 million people. But it’s become a very expensive program. It’s over $100 billion dollars a year, because we have so many folks who need help affording groceries. So this bill would cut $200 billion over 10 years.
But it does some really key, has some really key policy changes. It expands work requirements to apply to more people between the ages of 55 and 64. So basically there’s a time limit for how much, for how long you can be on SNAP if you fall within a certain age range and you are not showing that you’re working 20 hours a week. Or you can also be doing training or other things. But it’s traditionally been called the ABAWD work requirement, but really it’s like a time limit. You can only get SNAP for 90 days in a three-year period if you do not show you’re working. There’s all these ways that states have been able to get around this.
This bill, both bills, both the House and Senate bills tighten those up. They basically make it harder for states to waive these requirements. They make sure that they apply to a much, much larger number of people. We don’t know the exact numbers, but the real end result here is more people get pushed off the program. That is the result.
Theodore: Just talk about, I want to talk about those work requirements for a second, because the Economic Policy Institute, which I think is — they have a lot of good statistics on this stuff. They had a report where they came out against work requirements, and they had an interesting stat.
Now, the average income from work from an 18- to 59-year-old in the U.S. is about $51,000 a year. For a SNAP or Medicaid user, how much money they make from work is about $19,000. So when we’re talking about these work requirements, when we’re talking about the people involved in this discussion, we’re not just talking about the poor, we’re talking about the very poor.
So that’s who’s being pushed out of SNAP by these potential changes, right?. So I just want to interject that sort of context. I think it’s important to know who we’re talking about, right?
Helena: Yeah. And in the last couple rounds of the farm bill, those types of changes — not these exact changes but similar changes — similar policies were proposed and they were considered too controversial, too partisan to put through, like they couldn’t get through the Senate.
And so those have been big fights that were ultimately not pushed through in the last farm bill. So really what we’re seeing now is a Republican effort to get around that process and to cut SNAP through reconciliation. They’re also going to basically completely eliminate SNAP education, or SNAP ed, which is a pot of money that funds a lot of cooking classes and, you know, nutrition education for different SNAP participants and low-income communities. And so that’s really angered a lot of nutrition advocates, especially in a MAHA era, where those are the types of programs where they think there’s alignment. And they also make it harder for future administrations to increase the SNAP benefit substantially.
So the Biden administration used this process called the Thrifty Food Plan, which is basically just updating the underpinning of the SNAP benefit, how it’s calculated. And the Biden administration was able to increase SNAP benefits by, like, 21 percent on average, permanently. That was a really big increase.
Well, both of these bills take that ability away, they can just basically just keep up with inflation. And so there’s some real changes here that impact millions of people. And it’s probably going to be something that Democrats absolutely hammer Republicans on ahead of the midterms. So not just SNAP, but there’s also Medicaid, work requirements, and other changes that would cut Medicaid. And lots of tax cuts as well.
Theodore: I want to take this back to something you said about the farm bill, right?. So what we’re looking at here, if I understand it correctly, in the Senate and the House bills, it’s not just that they’re cutting that, the cuts to SNAP and the way SNAP is structured, but there’s also an increase, not nearly of the same size, but there is an increase for our commodities growers, the subsidies that go to commodities growers.
Helena: Yup. Yup.
Theodore: These are, this is the fight in the farm bill every five years where it comes up, and the farm bill has lapsed. I mean it, well, it hasn’t lapsed entirely.
Helena: Yeah. We’re on some extensions. Yeah. Who knows?
Theodore: We’re on extension. So the thing that we’re seeing here, along with reconciliation being an end run around Democrats and an end run around the filibuster, this is an end run around the farm bill.
Helena: Yes. Yes.
Theodore: Because it is the things that the Republicans and the Democrats fight over every time. And they’re just getting it from a different means. I guess from your perspective, as somebody who’s really an expert on food policy, what do we think this means for the farm bill and whether or not it’s going to get renewed?
Helena: Yeah. I asked the — the Senate Republican staff did a briefing for reporters on this when the bill came out. Was that last week or the week before? Whenever, recently. I know we’re filming a little, or recording a bit early. So recently, when staff, when reporters were there, I asked them, are we ever going to have another farm bill?
Does this poison the well, basically? And I think there is concern about, just generally. I mean, farm bills are getting really hard to do, right? Like the Congress is dysfunctional. They’re getting harder and harder to do. There’s always these fights. So that was already a problem.
And reconciliation, what’s going through right now, is absolutely infuriating Democrats, right? Because they’re — I think it is seen as a way to circumvent the farm bill and to push through these policies that, you know, normally couldn’t get through the Senate. So there’s a lot of bad blood. But the staff were basically saying that, you know, we’ve had fights before.
We’ve had to all kind of put on our good faces and figure it out, and dust ourselves off. And so I think they’re trying to be kind of optimistic about being able to do a farm bill in the future. It would be a skinny farm bill, so they would deal with the other things, right? So lots of other programs, lots of smaller programs that are not dealt with in the reconciliation package.
Theodore: Which is what the Republicans have always wanted. They’ve always wanted the skinny farm bill. They want to break SNAP out from the farm bill and pass without it, right?
Helena: So what they’re doing in the reconciliation package is they’re increasing spending there in both the bills. But let’s look at the Senate bill, because I think it’s slightly more likely to become the final, though we’ll see. It’s like $67 billion more for different farm support, farm subsidy. So that stays together, right? This is the Senate Agriculture Committee’s portion of reconciliation, right?
So that’s what they’re sending through in this big package. So everything else in the farm bill, like ag research, energy, conservation, some of the conservation stuff — all the policy, including policy on all sorts of other things, like farm to school. I mean, whatever, you know, so many things. That is all leftovers.
It’s all the leftovers. It’s not the big, big things that they traditionally fight over and that are, like, really pressing. And so I think you run the risk of, what, what really pushes a farm bill? What is the mechanism that really — if farmers feel like they’ve already gotten a plus up in their subsidies, Democrats are still furious about the SNAP cuts.
What is it that, like, pushes it, you know what I mean? Where’s the impetus to do it? I don’t think it’s looking good. I feel like we’re not going to see another farm bill for a long time. Maybe they’ll extend, you know, do some extensions, but it’s hard for me to see how this moves forward.
And, you know, I covered when school — so school nutrition reauthorization, CNR, used to happen every five years. They would, the Congress would reauthorize these programs, they would change policy, they would update things. And that hasn’t happened since 2010. So for 15 years. And having covered that bill really closely, I’m always very mindful of, like, Congress can just stop doing things.
Yeah, it happens. And the farm bill, I feel like, is starting to see those same signs of Congress may just not do it as regularly or for a long time. I don’t know. So I think it’s teetering, and I think this, the whole reconciliation thing, definitely makes it a lot more difficult.
Theodore: And without intent. And you know, one of the things you said in one of your recent newsletters, which I think — you know, you’re not a prognosticator, you can’t see the future. But you called this bill, whether it’s the Senate version or the House version, too big to fail, right? So what are we looking at?
Helena: I think it’s going to pass. I mean, look, there’s other things that could take this bill down. Like there’s fights over SALT deductions, which I don’t even understand, frankly. Particularly New York Republicans are always fighting over tax deductions and how they work.
And there’s other controversial pieces. You know, the Medicaid stuff is deeply unpopular, I think, when you poll about it. There’s a lot of stuff in this bill that has a lot of political risk for Republicans. So there’s always a chance,, and, you know, the margins are tight, but the administration has put so much on this bill. Like this is the whole golden ticket agenda, and I think both the House and Senate leadership are really committed to getting it done. So it’s hard to see how it would get fully derailed. But, I mean, stranger things have happened, so I don’t know..
But it does look like it is likely to get done. I think that’s where the conventional sort of political people are on that right now.
Theodore: So moving on from this, but before we get to our last segment, I just want to do a little shout out there into the ether to Senator Bill Cassidy, right? There was an article in the NOTUS blog — NOTUS, like POTUS, SCOTUS..
Helena: Oh, NOTUS, NOTUS. Sorry. Oh, I didn’t see this. Yeah. Tell me about it.
Theodore: No, I was just saying, you know, it’s one of these typical things you might see about Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski. He’s feeling very uneasy about RFK Jr. This just this doesn’t seem to be going all right.
Maybe he wasn’t quite so frank with us and sincere with him in his confirmation hearings, but, oh, yeah, I could get primaried, so I’m not going to say too much. And I just want to read you this little quote from the blog, which I thought was pretty good, describing how Kennedy is, or Cassidy, excuse me.
“He’s trying to split the baby on this. Naturally, he wants to be a little bit more aggressive against RFK Jr. and some of the things that he’s talking about.” This is from a Republican strategist, unnamed. “I wouldn’t say Republican voters are saying, like, ‘We love RFK Jr.’ But he is seen as an emissary of the president.”
So I always get sort of, I get upset about these things. You know, not angry, but just upset, because I don’t think Bill Cassidy and someone like him in Congress or in the Senate is going to do anything to oppose RFK Jr. But there still is this belief within some corners of the media — NOTUS is … NOTUS?
Helena: Yeah, NOTUS.
Theodore: NOTUS. NOTUS is not the mainstream media, right?
Helena: Yeah. I think it is. So NOTUS is actually, I think it’s a nonprofit, it’s a startup news site that was started by Robert Allbritton, who used to own Politico. So I would consider …
Theodore: Fair enough.
Helena: But, you know, they’re up and coming.
They’re not part of, sort of the …Theodore: You know what I’d say is the mainstream media? This is my definition of mainstream media: I can pronounce the name easily.
Helena: So I would say the brand is new. The brand is new on the block. You know, I know some of the folks over there. They’ve got some really good reporters.
They actually are the ones who broke the citation scandal with the MAHA Commission report. They went through all of the citations for that report. I think there were 522, and they found seven of them were completely fake.
Theodore: That’s how I learned about them.
Helena: I read that. Yeah. And they’re, you know, doing a lot of solid reporting in Washington. But anyway, so NOTUS had this — I see no sign that Cassidy is going to bring down the hammer, you know. There are several vaccine moves that Kennedy has made hat truly do break pledges he made on camera to Cassidy.
And I would say if that’s not going to be the line crossed, I’m not sure what it would be that would push that. I just, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about, I guess, the local political situation there. But I do think it gets to some of the political potency around MAHA, as much as the public health community and scientists and everyone hate it.
I get that. But the fact of the matter is that is a part of that base now. It’s always — we will see like how powerful I guess it ends up being, but I think there is some fear of that, of those voters.
Theodore: Yeah. I also think, my rule of thumb was, don’t really take much stock in a troubled congressman.
Let’s look at what they do if …
Helena: You know, he could call him before his committee quite easily.
Theodore: He could. He could.
Helena: I don’t know what’s going to happen there. But you’re starting to see more. I think the gloves have come off a lot more from particularly the medical community on some of the moves that Kennedy has made specifically on vaccines that — and I don’t cover this issue — but that the a i ACIP committee, firing all of those experts has, it just feels likethat whole thing entered a new era of kind of oh, shit. From the …
Theodore: We’ve got to leave that.
Helena: … from the infectious disease folks, from the American Academy of Pediatrics. I started to hear more frank pushback in a way that it really, there has been a lot of very quiet —
I feel like everyone freaks out about Kennedy quietly. They’ll off the record, like, ah, you know, whatever. But a lot of groups are really careful, and we saw this with agriculture, too. They really held fire until the MAHA Commission report came out. And even then, a few of the statements have been a little bit fiery, but everyone seems to be really careful about
not getting too crosswise with the administration. It’s really interesting to watch. I think it’s, in some ways, been a little bit surprising.
Theodore: This is true. All right, so let’s move on to our last section. This is our good vibes, and for this one I want us to talk about — it’s a little tongue in cheek,
we’re going to have a little fun here. There was a report recently that the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which is going to be released sometime later this year, that they were going to drop the recommendations that women should limit themselves to one drink per day and that men should limit themselves to two.
Now, what’s funny about this to me, and you can take it more seriously than I do, is that it doesn’t say what you should do other than drink moderately. The question is, I guess, is this a good vibe for the Trump era? We should be drinking more, possibly.
Helena: Look, I think this was a great scoop from Reuters. They clearly got some intel that the folks working on the Dietary Guidelines — which are jointly released by HHS and USDA, by the way, so this is going to be a Brooke Rollins and RFK Jr. project — they got some intel that the folks working on this are considering this — or maybe. It’s a little bit hard because they’re still under development, so, they did couch it as, like, this could change.
It’s unclear to me whether or not the Dietary Guidelines that they’re going to release are still just going to say limit alcohol very clearly and sort of just not get into the specifics. That could be what is happening here, which I don’t know that that’s a win for the alcohol industry, right,
to clearly say limit. Whereas is it more permissive to say one drink or two drinks a day? Like that feels a little bit more permissive? I don’t know. I think it will depend a lot on how they message it. And we don’t know exactly what it’s going to say. So I think it’s a little bit early to be, like, they’re going to say more drinking is fine.
If you step back, though, it is super interesting that we do not know where MAHA is on alcohol. They never talk about alcohol, none of the MAHA influencers. If it’s ever mentioned, it’s super briefly. It’s not a focus. They focus on other issues they’re really worked up about: seed oils and ultraprocessed foods and sugar.
Even sodium is weirdly not a thing that’s really focused on. And so we don’t really know where this is going to land. The Dietary Guidelines, though, overall are going to be really, really simple. They’ve been very clear about that. I think they’re aiming for four pages, and the last iteration, which by the way, were released under the first Trump administration.
So whenever they’re like railing on them, it’s like a weird thing to remember that it was the Trump administration who did the last round. But the last round was, I think, 164 pages. There’s a lot of details in there. You know, you can get into, like, what do they say about beans? What do they say about cranberries?
What do they — you know, there’s tons of lobbying. This has always been a political process. As much as the government doesn’t want to admit that, it is. There’s entire industries set up around lobbying to get more favorable language on whatever it is: coffee, tea, water, milk. I mean, it’s a bonanza every five years, right?
I’ve covered this process for a long time. You hope that in the end, you know, and I think over time, the Dietary Guidelines, they don’t radically change, right? Like they always say more fruits and vegetables, right? Like whole grains. They’ve long said, limit saturated fat. I think it will be really interesting to see what they say on saturated fat.
They could drop that. MAHA really likes saturated fat, thinks that the entire nutrition establishment, science, government advice is just plain wrong. So I mean, it’s going to be fascinating to see what they say. They’re also going to tell people to eat less ultraprocessed food, which is going to be new. And you know, that messaging is deeply threatening to the food industry. They hate it.
Theodore: Well, for now, given where we are …
Helena: Yeah, I would say, I would say, were you already following the Dietary Guidelines?
Theodore: I don’t know if I was. I do know that I will use this as leverage to drink an extra beer tonight.
Helena: Well, I will not be the one to stand in the way of that.
We do have a lot of evidence that mostly people do not follow the Dietary Guidelines, but they do matter. They send signals to people.
Theodore: I think they do matter.
Helena: Yeah. I mean, if you look at certain food — you know, eggs, I feel like finally got out of the cage, right, over dietary cholesterol guidance changing.
So there’s certain things where they definitely do matter, but I think it’s likely we’ll see a lot of political fighting over this round. So I don’t know. Cheers to your extra beer, I guess.
Theodore: Yeah, I guess that’s it. That was the idea for the good vibe. We didn’t have anything that was a particularly good vibe, but that seemed to be, to fit the bill.
I think that’s going to be it for today, Helena. I think we covered a lot of ground, and I thank you for everything you do. And we will be back in two weeks.
Helena: Yeah. Thanks to everyone for listening. We’ve gotten some really good feedback. And drop us a line. Yeah. Send us suggestions.
Theodore: Take care.
Helena: You, too. Bye.
Theodore: Forked is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross and Tom Laskawy. Our sound engineer is Lauren Newsome. Katie Gardner is the producer and video producer for Forked. Our hosts are Helena Bottemiller Evich and me, Theodore Ross.
To find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting, go to www.thefern.org.